Wreckers

In 17th and 18th century Britain, there were numerous stories of local residents in Cornwall and the Scilly Isles extinguishing the fires of lighthouses so that passing ships would come ashore or, alternatively, building fires to lure ships to be wrecked on local rocks. The wreckers are said to have murdered crewmen who survived and stolen the ships’ cargoes. They would also have taken or cut up as much of the vessels as could be carried off, to be sold or used for other purposes. As far as I can tell, it’s not clear that any of these stories were true, but they certainly got attention at the time, and still do.

What we are seeing in the United State is wrecking on a much larger scale, being carried on by Trump/Krasnov, Musk and their helpers. Instead of lone ships, their quarry is the United States, until recently the most prosperous, powerful nation on Earth.

In part the wreckers are motivated by private greed—Trump/Krasnov has been made much, much richer through the corruption that has blossomed exponentially since November 5th, while Musk—whose investment in Tesla has gone through a vertiginous drop—is trying to get what he can. And what he can will be immense, even by his standards, if he succeeds in making his Starlink system the default satellite communications system for the United States government, privatizing weather forecasting and air-traffic control, not to mention privatizing Social Security, Medicare and other entitlement programs, from which he would certainly profit (and devil take the intended beneficiaries).

But there is more to it than that. The wreckers are not only motivated by greed, but also by ideology—a burning desire to destroy the federal government. They may take cover behind a claim to be conservative, but that is a lie. As Heather Cox Richardson pointed out today, conservatives want to save what works, and to move ahead carefully, their view epitomized by Edmund Burke. But, as Prof. Richardson observes, “In 2025 the Republicans in charge of the United States of America are not the conservatives they call themselves; they are the dangerous ideological radicals Burke feared. They are abruptly dismantling a government that has kept the United States relatively prosperous, secure, and healthy for the past 80 years.” She goes on to suggest that those people want to impose a government based on the idea that a few men should rule.

I’m not so sure of that, or at least, I’m not sure that belief in the divine right of wealth is the whole answer. To me, the single-minded fervor of Musk and the toadying of Trump’s cabinet and appointees is coupled with the President’s obvious mental decline to advance a pathological desire to tear down the government with the fervor of berserkers carrying out destruction for its own sake. In short, those people are just plain nuts.

But there is also a malign purpose or, rather, two malign purposes at work. One is that the people now running things into the ground are the same people who have been telling us for decades that government does not work, that government is the problem. Now, they are going to prove it by making sure that government really does not work. Of course, voters ought to reject that idea, if only because of the self-fulfilling prophecy at play, but such obvious conclusions are often invisible to many. An important part of our job will be to make sure that the wreckers don’t get away with that swindle.

The other part of the malignancy is the utter and obvious sadism involved. Trump, Musk and their henchpeople have contempt for poor and working-class Americans, and others like them around the world. They actually enjoy making such people suffer. What else can you take from the way that they have targeted programs to fight hunger and disease, to protect against corruption, to keep the air we breathe and the water we drink from poisoning us, to protect the values embodied in the inalienable, unarguable truths of the Declaration of Independence?

For many decades, I said that I did not believe in the idea of evil. Now, I think I was wrong.

Finally, as counterpoint, I give you John Larson, Democrat of Connecticut, telling the House Ways and Means Committee how it is. (Very likely, you’ve seen this already, but you’ll get not apology from me for posting it here, even if you have.)

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